Daily quotes from Professor Patrick J. Deneen’s published works and lectures. Author of “Why Liberalism Failed” & “Regime Change: Towards a Post-Liberal Future”
The widespread yearning for a strong leader, one with the will to take back popular control over liberalism’s forms of bureaucratized government and globalized economy, comes after decades of liberal dismantling of cultural norms & political habits essential to self-governance.
-Patrick Deneen in his lecture “After Liberalism”, the 19th annual Holmer Memorial Lecture on October 17, 2014 at the Bell Museum Auditorium, University of Minnesota.
“Liberalism is not constitutionalism, it is not the rule of law, it is not the rule of elected representatives, it is not the separation of Church and State, it is not the recognition of rights that are attached to individuals. 🧵
Friends, in the nineteenth century, many counter-revolutionaries predicted the dangers that liberalism would eventually pose to traditional morality and religion. In this clip, Patrick J. Deneen argues that, in light of those predictions coming true, the Church must now read the signs of the times and be willing to examine and critique liberal democracy.
Watch our full conversation here: https://t.co/kXfUFnQd7Y
that we moderns are prone to label the ‘Dark Ages.’ Liberalism is rather a distinct way of thinking about and understanding these various institutional, legal, judicial, and social arrangements - that now largely claims all of these forms as their own making and invention.”
Modernism’s rejection of classical principles are, at heart, a rejection of order in the name of freedom - freedom especially from the constraints of nature.
Liberalism did not introduce the idea of choice. It dismissed the idea that there are wrong or bad choices, and thereby rejected the accompanying social structures and institutions that were ordered to restrain the temptation toward self-centered calculation.
Nancy Pelosi did not like what I had to say...
Populism is not a threat to democracy.
Democrat elites like her are.
Watch my full Oxford Union speech from the debate with her:
The “freedom agenda” is a losing proposition, one inherently destined to lose in an age of disorder, since progressives will always to seek to advance a more radical form of freedom.
-Patrick J. Deneen
To misidentify one’s gender once was medically described as a disorder. The longstanding effort to deny that there is a fundamental order in the world, one example of which is the fact that the overwhelming majority of humans are either male or female… 🧵
"Universities that were created in the belief that a civilization must protect liberty through the cultivation of principles of justice and virtue are today in the forefront of advancing new principles of despotism." - Patrick Deneen @PatrickDeneen
Critics of populism tend to don what the French geographer Christophe Guilluy calls a “faux egalitarianism” in their modernized versions of “medieval citadels,” generally congratulating themselves on their egalitarian commitments while denouncing the bigotry of the working class.